The stubbornly unpredictable NFL

Two years ago, Josh McDaniels proved the critics wrong by going undefeated in his first six games as the Broncos’ head coach.

Last season, the Patriots definitively showed the Jets who was boss in the AFC East, winning a 45-3 December blowout on “Monday Night Football.”

McDaniels’ team lost 15 of its next 20 games, and he had lost his job before the end of his second season. New England, the AFC favorite to reach the Super Bowl, hosted the Jets six weeks after the Monday rout and bowed out of the playoffs with a 28-21 loss.

A wise person told me years ago that whatever new truths we discover in an NFL regular season will usually turn out to be false within a month. In 2011, that theory has held up pretty well.

Detroit had a 5-0 juggernaut, and now the Lions have lost two in a row in Ford Field, a stadium where a playoff-material home team should never lose two in a row. Kansas City looked like the primary draft receiver for Andrew Luck after an 0-3 start, including two losses by a combined 79 points. Now, the Chiefs have won three in a row, dismantling the Raiders in Oakland 28-0, and have a chance to tie for the division lead when they host San Diego next Monday night.

The Raiders should face Tebow after a bye week, and if he plays as badly as he did for the first 90 percent of Sunday’s game in Miami, he could be Oakland’s salvation.

At the moment, the Raiders look thoroughly rudderless. They looked awful on the field Sunday and sounded even worse when they answered questions about the quarterback job. From the head coach to the offensive coordinator to newly arrived Carson Palmer, no one seemed to be reading from the same script.

Hue Jackson’s charming persona veered off in the wrong direction whenever he addressed the issue. He sounded like someone auditioning for Ryan Seacrest’s job on “American Idol,” stringing out suspense over who was voted off the show. (If only the goal-line runs by Michael Bush had been that well-disguised. …)

But the Raiders can pull themselves back together, as long as Darren McFadden’s injured foot heals quickly. Most of the players on this team were around last year, when the club started to regain respectability despite playing under a head coach marked as a lame duck, with his heir apparent working on the same staff.

Now, they have reached 4-2 despite the offseason loss of their all-Pro cornerback and their supremely reliable tight end. This is a remarkably resilient group, and the antics of the last week stemmed from unprecedented circumstances.

The Raiders lost their starting quarterback. A Pro Bowler who had worked with the head coach in the past just happened to be on the market six weeks into the season. The trade deadline required that the deal to get Palmer be done quickly, rather than in the bye week, when he could have had more time to prepare for his first game in a Raiders uniform.

Sending Kyle Boller out as the starter made sense from a football perspective; Palmer hadn’t had nearly enough time to assimilate. But before he got the starting nod, Boller also received a resounding no-confidence vote from his coach, who had called the deal to get his replacement the greatest trade in football history. After that, it wasn’t terribly surprising that he threw three interceptions in a little over a half a game.

Then again, maybe the Chiefs aren’t that awful. We don’t know yet. Most of the teams in the NFL haven’t really defined themselves. Injuries will reshape teams (a mass of them disguised Green Bay’s excellence until the playoffs last year). Detroit may not have quarterback Matthew Stafford next week, but the Lions could thrive under Shaun Hill, probably the strongest backup in the league.

Four teams are now using rookie quarterbacks as their starters – Carolina, Minnesota, Jacksonville and Cincinnati. The Bengals are complete wild cards. Palmer went into retirement to force a trade out of what appeared to be a hapless organization, and now his replacement, Andy Dalton, has the team at 4-2 – exactly where the Raiders sat when he agreed to a deal to join them last week.

Palmer believed that the Bengals were going nowhere. As of now, they have proven him wrong. Will the evidence last as long as it did for McDaniels in Denver?